Is Rit still a good dye for fabric?

I have to dye a lab coat for a costume and it needs to be a bright color. I saw Dylon dye next to the Rit dye at the store. Which is better?

Dylon dyes are superior to Rit dyes. The Dylon Cold Dyes, Dylon Permanent Dyes, and Dylon Machine Dyes are all long-lasting fiber reactive dyes. They will not fade nearly as quickly as all purpose dyes, such as Rit dye, and they can be washed with your laundry safely at any temperature (once you've washed then once in cool water and twice in hot water to remove any unattached excess dye). Garments dyed with all-purpose dye should be hand-washed, separately from other colors, in cool water.

(Note that Dylon Multi Purpose dye, which is not available in the US, is a type of all-purpose dye. It is therefore inferior to the other Dylon dyes, if you are dyeing cotton, linen, or rayon. Serious hand-dyers prefer to buy other brands of fiber reactive dyes, such as Procion MX or Drimarene K dyes, instead of Dylon dyes; the dyes themselves are similar, but are available in brighter colors for mixing your own blends.)

Is your lab coat 100% cotton? If so, it will dye up brightly. If it is polyester or a polyester blend, neither Rit nor Dylon dyes can produce a bright color, because polyester will not dye with either of these types of dyes. You can buy 100% cotton lab coats from Dharma Trading Company that will dye up beautifully in any color, but that would require planning ahead by a week in order to allow for delivery time.

If you have a polyester or polyester blend lab coat and want to dye it today to use by tomorrow night, you'll have to use fabric paint instead of dye. Go to a crafts store and get a good quality thin fabric paint, such as Jacquard Products' Dye-na-flow. You can dilute it with up to 25% water and dip the coat in it like a dye. If you use diluted ordinary artists' acrylic paints, instead of fabric paint, the results will be stiff and scratchy, but probably good enough for a one-time-use costume.

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[Portions of this answer were first posted, by me, on Yahoo answers, on October 30, 2008.]